Cover

Title page

T. Chris Martindale

NIGHTBLOOD

With a new introduction by

GRADY HENDRIX

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Introduction by Grady Hendrix

INTRODUCTION

If you thought ’Salem’s Lot needed more Uzis, welcome to Nightblood. Hopped up on comic books, horror, and action movies, author Chris Martindale delivers the equivalent of a late-Eighties action movie set in a world of Cherry Coke and Bon Jovi, where Fright Night plays on HBO and characters in long overcoats kill vampires with katanas and nunchakus, probably in slow motion. It’s a time capsule of a certain kind of totally disreputable, big-balled, hairy-chested book that doesn’t really exist anymore. The kind of book where the master vampire preens and struts, purring, “Have you ever come across anyone like me before?”

“Oh,” the hero deadpans. “I’ve met lots of assholes over the years.”

If this book was a movie, you’d catch it on the USA Network in the middle of the night or on TBS one lazy Saturday afternoon.

Born and raised in Indiana, Martindale grew up the youngest of three brothers, all of whom were huge comic book fans, and whose mom read John Carter of Mars and Gor stories to them out loud. Fresh out of Indiana University, Martindale saw an ad in Writer’s Digest that TSR was seeking writers for their knock-off Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book series, Endless Quest. Figuring “What the hell,” Martindale sent them Duel of the Masters, a martial-arts flavored adventure, which they bought and published in 1984. “I’d start a lot of projects and never finish anything,” Martindale remembers. “That was the first thing I started that I saw through to the end.”

Writing for a flat fee, Martindale turned in two more gamebooks for TSR (Curse of the Werewolf, 1987; Prince of Thieves, 1988) but started getting bored. “It was kind of like writing a flowchart,” he says. “By the time I got to the third book it was getting tiresome to come up with a new way to kill a character after killing them thirteen or so times.” He started writing a straight fantasy horror novel, then stumbled across buried treasure. As kids, Chris and his brothers were big fans of Marvel’s horror comics like Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night, and they used to create their own characters. Martindale’s brother, Ted, had come up with “Chris Stiles, Ghost Breaker” and written a few paragraphs about Stiles waking up in his room, talking to the ghost of his dead brother. His other brother, Kevin, had drawn a sketch of the character and now, years later, “Chris Stiles, Ghost Breaker” came alive.